Dwindlehop wrote:Also, polls show Kerry/Edwards with a respectable lead.
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htmWhat's more, breaking the polls down by state yields an electoral college victory for Kerry/Edwards, though many states are too close to call.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/The real test will be the Republican national convention. If Kerry can hang onto the lead after that, I predict fairly smooth cruising.
I disagree. These are the same kind of polls that told us Dean's victory in the Democratic primaries was a given. Right now, I still predict a Bush victory.
I see Kerry winning in one of three scenarios:
1) A single event in Iraq causes massive American casualties. One, two, or ten American casualties a day is just background noise to most voters. Only a real shock would make any of the people who still support the war change their minds.
2) Job growth remains stagnant, and doesn't pick up even once between now and November. The average voter doesn't understand macroeconomics well enough to see that Bush's policies are stupid. Worse, any uptick in the economy can be claimed as a recovery and many voters will believe it. Only when fear for their jobs becomes stronger than their fear of the terrorists will voters jump ship to Kerry.
3) Bush or a large number of his key advisors are involved in a major scandal in late October that resists their efforts to spin it. Any earlier and voters would forget by election day. It couln't be any of these Michael Moore connect-the-dots type scandals either. It would have to be something both indisputable and abhorant to their core voting block like being caught in the middle of gay sex, openly converting to Islam, or discovery of a detention center full of white Christians held and tortured secretly under the Patriot Act. I suspect Bush could weather a heterosexual affair, another Halliburton thing, or just about anything else.
However, there are many more probable events that would pretty much guarantee a Bush victory. A terrorist attack of any scale on US soil, successful bribery of a single Diebolt software engineer, or continued job growth (even if confined to the fast food sector).
I feel like I just beat a kitten to death... with a bag of puppies.